Monitoring and dietary exposure assessment of pesticide residues in strawberry in Beijing, China

ABSTRACT

In this study, 142 pesticide residues in 245 strawberry samples, gathered from farmers markets or supermarkets in Beijing from June 2017 to May 2018, were investigated. The samples were analysed by high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS). According to the validation data, including linearity, recovery, precision and measurement uncertainty, the method performed well in monitoring pesticide residues and complied with the requirements of the European Guideline SANTE/11813/2017. Among the strawberry samples, 26.0% contained at least one pesticide residue, four of which contained pesticide residues that exceeded the maximum residue limit of China. Carbendazim, pyrimethanil and azoxystrobin were the most frequently detected pesticides in the strawberry samples. Lower bound, middle bound and upper bound values were used to replace left-censored results. In the worst-case scenario, the hazard index (HI) for adults and children was 0.91% and 3.62%, respectively. Carbofuran, bifenazate and pyraclostrobin were identified as the top three contributors to HI.

KEYWORDS:

• Dietary exposure
• pesticide residue
• strawberry
• hazard index
• HPLC-MS/MS

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Additional information

Funding

This work was financially supported by the Key Research and Development Project of Hainan Province [ZDYF2020078] and “N Special” project of Institute of Agro-Products Processing, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences [CAAS-ASTIP-2021-IFST-SN2021-10] and National Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Programme [CAAS-ASTIP-2021-IFST].